The Best Magento Hosting in 2020

Magento hosting is one of the most popular standalone e-commerce platforms on the market and has managed to keep its share over the last few years, despite tough competition. If you are an e-commerce store owner and you need complete flexibility with your website’s shopping cart, Magento is the way to go. If you have Magento installed, it means you have total control over how your online store will look, its functionality and the content.

Lately, Magento has seen revolutionary upgrades with great user experience in mind, with additions such as numerous themes to customize your website and integrate it with useful applications that fit your business needs. These themes have been optimized to load faster and perform better with functionalities such as tools to enhance the search functionality or shipment notifications.

This article will compare a few providers that are considered to be among the best Magento hosting companies based on their performance, customer support, features and safety that they come with. These providers are:

Siteground

With more than 1,900,000 domains and over 400 employees, Siteground is a Bulgaria-based company and has been designed and optimized for developers and web designers who maintain the websites of their customers over a period of time.

StartUp: Suitable for a website with monthly visits of up to 10,000, the plan costs $3.95 per month (down from $11.95 for a special price) it provides a web space of 10GB, 1 hosted website and 1 level of SuperCacher.

GrowBig: Suitable for a website with monthly visits of up to 25,000, the plan costs $5.95 per month (down from $19.95 for a special price) it provides a web space of 20GB, an unlimited number of websites, all 3 levels of SuperCacher and free backup and restore.

GoGeek: Suitable for a website with monthly visits of up to 100,000, the plan costs $11.95 per month (down from $34.95 for a special price) it provides a web space of 30GB, an unlimited number of websites, all 3 levels of SuperCacher and free backup and restore.

Please note that all the prices are for only the first invoice and the regular renewal prices will apply once the initial term is over. All the plans include unlimited MySQL DB, free CMS installation, unmetered data transfer, unlimited sub and parked domains, free email accounts, proactive updates, cPanel and Softaculous, free auto daily backups, patches power and hardware redundancy.

If you have the GrowBig and GrowGeek plans, all your issues are solved with priority.

Here are some exciting features that Siteground offers:

Siteground has long-term expertise in providing expertise to Magento websites and all their shared hosting plans include a free Magento installation just with a few clicks.

The company monitors the overall security status of Magento applications and their plugins and follows strict audit procedures so that fixes can be applied as vulnerabilities occur.

Apart from proving a hassle-free Magento installation, Siteground also provide helps with popular Magento themes and modules.

With the GoGeek plan, you can create a Git repository of your Magento installation which you can later edit and download.

You get unlimited MySQL databases with all their shared hosting plans.

Multiple PHP Versions (7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 7.0 and 5.6), you can use multiple applications on a single account.

Free SFTP and SSH access enables a secure connection to your account, giving you access to databases and large files.

Pros

Great customer service solutions that claim to be the best in the industry.

Painless and easy Magento installation that is assisted by a brilliant wizard.

The toolkit includes a great anti-bot AI to block brute-force attacks and free SSL certificates.

Great pricing options that are suitable for all types of businesses.

Free auto daily backups so you can be sure to restore your website in case of an unforeseen event.

Overload and outage problems are a thing of the past with the fastest server monitoring.

Hostgator

Hostgator been around since 2002 and that alone should tell you how big a name they are in the hosting industry. With 8 million domains and 7,000 servers under management, they are also the largest in the world. They offer plans for WordPress, cloud, cheap VPS dedicated servers and cheap dedicated game servers apart from dedicated hosting. Let’s take a look at their pricing plans and features.

Hostgator provides an automatic Magento installer that makes the process as easy as the click of a button. Magento cloud, shared and enterprise hosting is compatible up to version 2.0 and the latest version is compatible with Magento dedicated and VPS hosting. Hostgator is highly recommended as a Magento provider because you get a toll free number, an SSL certificate and a dedicated IP address absolutely free of cost!

Hostgator has a lineup of 3 plans and they seem to understand your needs. Let us take a look at them:

Baby Plan: Starting at $3.95 a month, this plan offers local caching, unlimited domains, sub-domains and unmetered bandwidth, disk space, FTP accounts and subdomains, among other features. This is their most recommended plan.

Currently, all the plans are going at 60% off, and include $100 worth of Google Adwords and Bing Ads credits, and come with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This means that if your site is not up 99.9% of the time it is hosted with Hostgator, they will issue a service credit into your account for that month.

Other features include:

Easily see where your traffic is coming from, whether it is banner ads, referrals or search engines with AWStats real-time updates

Pros

Migrate your Magento website for free to Hostgator if you have your account elsewhere

Seasoned support staff quickly identifies your problems and guides you through them

Free SSL certificate available with all plans

Magemojo

Founded in 2010, Magemojo is a Pittsburg-based company that specializes in Magento hosting. This essentially means that every aspect, such as bandwidth, CPU, memory and servers are optimized for your Magento store. And though Magemojo is not the cheapest option out there, it is certainly tailor-made for those who want to run Magento stores.

Magemojo offers 6 autoscaling plans and 3 fixed-resource plans. The following are the autoscaling plans:

Stratus Starter: Priced at $98 per month, you get 2,500 included sessions with 36,000 maximum sessions per day, 1 dev site, 25G included disk, 1-hour support SLA and ticket support.

Stratus Pro: Priced at $298 per month, you get 7,500 included sessions with 54,000 maximum sessions per day, 3 dev sites, 75G included disk, 15-minute support SLA, ticket support and phone support 10-6, Monday-Friday ET.

Stratus Growth: Priced at $1,250 per month, you get 150,000 included sessions with 108,000 maximum sessions per day, 3 dev sites, 100G included disk, 15-minute support SLA, ticket support and phone support 10-6, Monday-Friday ET.

Stratus Scale: Priced at $2,500 per month, you get 525,000 included sessions with 360,000 maximum sessions per day, 5 dev sites, 150G included disk, 15-minute support SLA, ticket support and phone support 10-6, Monday-Friday ET.

Stratus Enterprise: Priced at $5,000 per month, you get 1,125,000 included sessions with 720,000 maximum sessions per day, 5 dev sites, 250G included disk, 15-minute support SLA, ticket support and phone support 10-6, Monday-Friday ET.

Stratus Custom: With this customizable option, you get 2,500,000 included sessions with 1,440,000 maximum sessions per day, 5+ dev sites, 500G+ included disk, 15-minute support SLA, ticket support and phone support 24x7x365.

Pros

Exclusive hosting for Magento

Pay-as-you-grow pricing plans eliminate guesswork

Support specific to Magento

Large, active community with developers specializing in Magento

Is Magento Worth It?

Magento, a feature-rich, open-source application has been around since 2008 and has loyal customers all over the world including corporations such as Coca-Cola, Olympus, Nike and several others. At the time of its release, it was the perfect solution to the non-developer community.

So the question is, whether you want to continue with their free edition, or would you want to invest? For store owners, Magento is a serious e-commerce platform and covers all the bases including little things such as discounting and vouchers and can be easily integrated into other systems. Add to the fact that it is very customizable.

Let us take a look at some advantages of Magento:

Since it is open source, Magento is completely free and so are a lot of features it comes with. It is also available in hosted and enterprise editions.

It has an efficient SEO ecosystem that takes care of landing pages, indexing, page traffic and duplicate content.

You can completely customize Magento because it is written in PHP, hence making it very scalable.

You can manage multiple stores with the help of Magento in their own admin panel.

Magento has a large, helpful and active community with a great forum, a website and even a dedicated Subreddit, and are great places to find solutions if you are facing any, or need developers who can help better your Magento experience.

So the simple question you must ask yourself is, do you want to take advantage of these free, great features that Magento proposes?

Magento vs Shopify

Both are different e-commerce platforms that allow you to build your online store. You can process sales and manage your inventory with these two, and also add on a number of payment options. Both of them are capable of plenty of add-ons to let you add new features and capabilities to your stores.

They are also both well equipped with great SEO features and support both free and paid themes, enabling you to easily set up your store. But these two work differently, so let’s find out how:

Functionality and Management: On a long-term basis, both stores are quite easy to set up and maintain are very user friendly. Inventory management can be automated on both to make things run smoothly. The difference here is that Shopify is a bit easy to learn compared with Magento.

Customization: Shopify takes the lead in ease of use, especially if you do not have any technical know how. This requires no coding experience and you can easily set up functioning stores with great visuals in a matter of hours. Magento, on the other hand, takes a little design and coding knowledge (if you have that, you can do wonders with its open-source software). So for this, you may need some external help if you want to maintain and update your website on a regular basis.

Extensions, Add-Ons: Both platforms have numerous add-ons, but Magento wins hands-down with more than 5,000 apps, while Shopify has about one-fifth of that number.

SEO: Both platforms fare well in this department and the use of external plugins or apps just makes it easier.

Conclusion

In this article, we compared the Magento hosting services of three major providers. Siteground has a number of great features and provides the best customer support in the industry, Hostgator offers you a service that is feature rich and reliable. But for these two, Magento hosting is just one of these services they offer. Magemojo, on the other hand, provides services exclusively for the Magento platform, and hence, is priced accordingly and specifically. Before you make a decision, be sure to look for the specific features that would help make your business more efficient, while still being economical.